1
The heat flamed out, again
And snow blanketed my sleep—
Soft and white and clean
Like iron-worn bottom sheets
Ballooning and billowing
In slow cumulus motion—
Their warmth whipped and
Flattened all too swiftly,
By hospital corners
Squared away in
My mother’s no-nonsense
Domestic bliss, once pristine,
Then crisply practiced.
2
Layer upon layer piled
Roadside gray where snowplows
Spewed grit, sand, and ice.
April rose raw and sunless,
And dirty drifts packed down
Into rough-hewn walls
My shovel could not breach.
Easter carols rang foreign,
And the concrete birdbath
Brimmed with stone water.
I wandered where prairies rolled,
Where the sod broke neatly
In prized rectangular patches
Months after my highlander
Father planted green beans
In crooked red clay rows
Before Good Friday thundered.
Here in the level lands,
My pocket-tucked seeds yearned
To burrow on Mother’s Day,
When nosegays of pink peonies
Flirted their ruffled skirts.
3
But the cold crept me awake,
And I took a bundled turn
In the neighbor’s garden.
The cypress moon gate shone
Silver, cooling bronze firedogs
Fiercely guarding each side.
My dim fingers unhooked the latch—
A tiny click in the silence.
The arbor and trellis showed
Their perpendicular bones.
A white-barked birch ghosted
The side yard, where large flakes
Muffled needle-thin bird tracks.
Bits of deep-green foliage pricked
Through smothered hedges.
The wind stormed the copper chimes.
4
I picked and plunged boot deep
Back to my deck and stared
Where winter had long buried
Nannie’s fishnet-mesh tabletop
That once baked on Georgia’s
Lemonade patio days;
The wind had sculpted the snow
In the laps of four ice-cream chairs—
Against their sweetheart backs,
Nannie’s rounded, fat foursome
Greedily played at bridge
For the weekly triumph
Of sweeping penny handfuls
Into dried leather pocketbooks
And smartly snapping them shut.
Nannie harrumphed her partner,
Thelma, who puffed her bosom,
As proud as a ship’s prow:
“For God’s sake, play a spade,
Or we’ll miss the shrimp cocktail.”
I fell for nature’s cheapest trick,
And the thermometer froze, broken.
Note: Originally, this concept appeared as a short prose piece. However, I recast it as a syllabic poem.
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